Monthly Archives: May 2017

The Bibbulmun Track is Western Australia’s premier walk trail, running from Kalamunda to Albany (1, 003.1 kms). Above is one of the many shelters interpsersed on the track for overnighting. The principle rule on the track is that walkers should leave no trace of themselves. So you take out what you take in, nothing is left behind, or as the guide book says, “Pack it in pack it out.” Serious track walkers travel light so this is not usually a problem.

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Detonation runs in the family. My father had a short fuse and he would regularly explode, which was ironic because his training in the early 1950s was as a Shotfirer in a coal mine. Doubly explosive. Dad knew the various combustible elements, liquid and solid. He had used Kero lamps and heaters for years. So, when he filled a kero heater tank with petrol, as a child I never thought about it. We were all outside, and my aunt arrived for her weekly visit. She smelt the petrol and flew into action and threw sand on the heater and saved the day. I was confused as to why this had happened. I know its only speculation, but I now suspect he was trying to burn the house down, because there’s no way he could not know the consequences.

Doubly explosive, just like two white dwarf planets drawing together and becoming a supernova, kapow!

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When I encounter this word it takes me right back to 97 and the realease of Malibu by Hole and the haunting voice of Courtney Love. Do you remember that refrain? “I can’t be near you, the light just radiates.” It stuck in my head. And I’ve met people like that, people who radiate, they stay with me too.

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That gate at Auschwitz 1, Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Makes You Free. But it didn’t, work was death, it was the act of dying, For Poles, Jews, Gypsys, metally ill people, gays, and others, the work was death. There was no reprieve from fear, starvation, malnutrition, ridicule, punishment, torture, experimentation, dehumanisation, murder by any means including the gas chamber. There was no reprieve.

And have we learned? I think not. I weep for others since: for the Jews murdered in camps under Stalin, for Nanking, the killing fields of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, for Srebrenica, Rwanda, Syria, there has been no reprieve from killing, because there is no reprieve from the faulty thinking that gives rise to the pathologies of nationalism, patriotism, flags, boundaries and the notion of ownership.

And then I think of the violence we all do, the hurt we bring to others in our lives, the violence we bring to nature. It reminds me that as I weep I am both agressor and victim, and nothing changes till I too change.

In the midst of this limestone formation, at the top of a cliff overlooking the Southern Ocean, in the D’Entrecasteaux National Park near a place called Windy Harbour (Northcliffe), is this wonderful sign of life. I wasn’t able to identify it, suffice to say that it is a native coastal shrub. It is a seedling that has begun life in the tiny amount of soil that has collected in the hollow of this formation, facing strong gusty winds, salty air and water, and a hot summer. Yet there it is, a survivor.